Sunday, 9 October 2011

Failure

A week past since I started my new course at Chelsea College. In the end of the first week, there was a project which my group failed to do it. We were given a huge sheet of plain white paper and had to make people interact with it.

We started the project with brain storming about what can we do with the sheet of paper. We got several ideas we like such as free hi-five, free candy, finger printing, huge picture flame, information paper.... Finally we end up with making a poster which attracts people to see it. However we all believed that our poster could be interactive for people, we completely failed.

It says "LOOK CLOSER" and there is a tiny message below the arrow.

The basic idea of our poster is that if there is something you can't see from a distance, people would come closer to see what is there. So we went to Vauxhall station where should be a lot of people there and especially at bus station, people standing and waiting for bus coming. In fact, there was no one who comes closer to the poster to see the secret message.
I think there are several reasons why our poster defeat our expectation. One is the location. Since other groups went to more tourist places such as Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar square, or Oxford circus where there are hundreds of tourists there. Compared to these places, Vauxhall station was not a place to find friendly people who will be curious about our project. Secondly, we had to work on people to focus on the poster, not just waiting from a faraway. Thirdly, I think we had to keep our idea much more simple rather than making a 'designer-like' piece. For example, the other group did 'free-moustache' at Trafalgar square and it was really successful. It was like an information paper that people can take a contact address in the bottom, but hand-drawn moustaches instead of contact address. People like free things especially if it makes people happy and if it is easy to take. The idea of free-moustache definitely enjoyable for people and the location was also perfect for that. If we have done free-candy poster, sticking candies on paper and people can take them, it would attract many people even if we done it at Vauxhall station because it is so simple and people like candies.
I think this project was a good try for me that I could learn many things from it.